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THE
TOWN PAPER
VOL. 5, NO. 2 -- SPRING 2003

Journalist/Author Michael Dolan
Turns the Light on "The American Porch"

By Karen O'Keefe

"Many people have a strong desire to feel connected with where they live
-- in their block and in their community. When I am on my porch, I can
sit there and feel connected. I can wave at people and then have them
wave back."

Yet connection, argues Michael Dolan, journalist, television writer/producer
and author of "The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal
Place" (Lyons Press; 2002), is just one of several needs satisfied by
the porch.

There is also a strong emotional bond between people and porches, Dolan
says. "Porches elicit deep emotional reactions. There is something about
a porch that makes your dorsal hairs rise -- even if you have never had
a porch."

Porches have aesthetic value as well -- pity the poor house that doesn't
have one. "A house without a porch is like a face without eyebrows," he
pronounces grimly.

Michael Dolan is a veteran writer. He has been writing for newspapers
and magazines, for nearly 30 years. He has written for Outside, Slate,
Washingtonian, Newsday, the New Yorker and many other outlets.
Dolan is also an award-winning TV documentary scriptwriter and producer.
Many of his shows and series have aired on the National Geographic Channel;
he also has worked on many National Geographic Explorer segments and Discovery
Channel productions.

A husband and a father, Dolan was the on-camera home-repair expert for
D.C.'s edition of "P.M. Magazine," and he has written lyrics for a rock
group. He has also been a community activist, organizing a variety of
things from neighborhood bicycle-gliding distance competitions to a successful
movement in 1981 to keep open the National Aquarium at the Commerce Department
in Washington, D.C.

In "The American Porch," he views the relationships and connections between
human beings and their things, and then weaves story-cloth, multi-hued
and many-textured, by following the thread of each interesting vignette
to its intersect with some other remarkable place with a story to tell.

His book is about much more than porches. Dolan describes it aptly in
the introduction as a "yard sale of history and happenstance."

"My book is really about people -- what people do, how things happen,"
he explains.

He recalls the moment when, practically by accident, he first turned his
attention to the American porch. He and his wife had recently completed
a total renovation of their 1920s Washington, D.C., bungalow in the eclectic
Palisades neighborhood. The overhaul had included the porch.

"I was sitting on the porch. . There was nothing out there except the
glider, on which I was sitting, cordless phone in lap. There'd just been
a thunderstorm.

"The phone rang. It was Alex Heard, a friend who'd just taken a job as
an editor at the New York Times Magazine. He was in charge of the
front of the book, which at that time (summer 1995) consisted of a series
of very brief articles.

Dolan wrote "the lightning thing," but when he tackled porches, he made
two discoveries. One was that he couldn't write an article a hundred words
long about the porch. The other was that he couldn't find a single volume
anywhere that recounted the history of the porch. So he decided to write
one.

In October 2002, "The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal
Place" (The Lyons Press, 2002) was published. Today, just four months
after initial publication, the book is in its second printing.

Dolan writes of the architecture of many different cultures and places
throughout history, including the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, India and
America. Throughout, he examines a panoply of other elements and experience:
sociology, anthropology, arts and aesthetics, economics, environment,
politics, housing as well as the renovation of his own bungalow.

Dowling maintains that the first American porch could have come from several
places around the world, but concludes that West Africa is most likely
its closest ancestral home.

The tribes on the African west coast or inhabiting the near interior all
have a word for "porch" in their language, Dolan explains. In the 1400s,
European explorers had no word for the African porch structures because
there was nothing like them in Europe.

The first thing enslaved Africans were forced to do upon arrival was build
homes for themselves. In the New World, until the 1700s, African slave
artisans built African villages to live in - with homes elevated off the
ground and an elevated exterior space on the front that functioned like
a room.

The porch evolved as part of American culture after that. "By the late
19th, early 20th century, the porch was firmly embedded in the American
consciousness," says Dolan. Among other reasons, in the 1920s and 30s,
people spent time outside on their porches "to see who was going by."

But then things changed.

By the early 1920s, the American porch was on its way out. "People became
tired of it," says Dolan. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, the new suburban
development boom killed the porch altogether as more space efficient,
porchless Cape Cods and ramblers became the mainstream suburban home.
Television and air conditioning contributed to the porch's downfall as
well.

"In a community where you drive into a garage and go right into the house,
you have to work hard to connect," says Dolan. "Something was lost when
the porch went away."

Today, the porch is back, he says. At Seaside, the famed new urbanist
town on the Florida panhandle, porches were included in the building code.

"What put Seaside on the map were the porches. People were wild about
'em."

Quoting Seaside planner Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk Dolan writes, "We began
to see a kind of complex inter-connected system with the wisdom of the
ages in [the porch]."

Dolan thinks porches have come back into American culture because people
have a desire, intensified by 9/11, to "embrace places that are more real,
are non-digital -- and are not gussied up." "When you step out onto the
porch, you are in that liminal space between inside and outside. You are
still in your space, but you can't control everything out there. You can't
control who is walking down the street. There is an infinite gradation
of interaction with other people [on and around the front porch.]

"My porch provided a lens through which to examine the world."

Dolan's story of the American porch's renaissance is one of growing appreciation
of community and life's simpler beauties.